


Just Trying to Get the Good

by allthingsholy



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: Age Difference, Bad Decisions, F/M, Roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-07
Updated: 2011-08-07
Packaged: 2017-10-22 08:42:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/236216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allthingsholy/pseuds/allthingsholy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ben’s mom always told him that bad news comes in threes. Leslie decides to run for city council; something happens between Andy and Ann; now it’s just a lot of waiting for the other shoe to drop. The rest should be pretty self-explanatory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Trying to Get the Good

Here’s the thing about turning over a new leaf, about raising your expectations: when everything goes to shit (because everything in Ben Wyatt’s life eventually goes to shit), it’s fucking awful. And it’s that much worse because he set his sights so high, that much worse than when he didn’t really expect it to work out in the first place. Now he has actual fucking _dreams_ and shit, and when everything just kind of peters out, Ben’s an actual fucking mess.

So yeah, Leslie decides to run for city council. The rest should be pretty self-explanatory.

\--

Ben’s mom always told him that bad news comes in threes, so he should be expecting it when he comes homes from work two weeks after breaking up with Leslie to find Andy sitting on their front lawn with piles of his clothes on the grass around him. At first he thinks it’s just some new writing thing Andy’s trying, communing with commercialism or something, or that Tom convinced him to start a Pawnee nudist colony and Andy’s just saying one last goodbye to all his t-shirts. Weirder things have happened, and all of them seem to have happened to Andy. But when Ben tries to open the door and it slams back in his face followed by April yelling in deafening Spanish, he finally gets a clue.

So yeah, something happens between Andy and Ann. Ben doesn’t get all the details (because again, Spanish, and honestly, he has his own shit) but he gets most of the pronouns and it works out somewhere along the lines of: “Mouse Rat” and “Ann” and “Snake Juice” and “asshole” and really he just wants to go inside so he can put on sweatpants and sit on the couch and moan, which is pretty much all Ben’s been doing since Leslie broke up with him.

First Leslie, then Andy. Bad news comes in threes and now it’s just a lot of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

\--

The house is basically the saddest place in Pawnee. April takes down all the Mouse Rat stuff on the walls and nobody talks very much. They watch a lot of cooking shows. April never says anything explicit about his break-up with Leslie (it _was_ supposed to be a secret, after all), but she knew when he stopped sleeping at the house and exactly when he came back, and indifferent is one thing but dumb is something else. The closest she gets to actually saying something is the first morning after she kicks Andy out, when they’re getting ready to leave for work and she freezes with her hand on the doorknob and breathes out for what seems like an hour. She looks at him, hard eyes and sturdy frown, and says, “Fuck them both,” before leading him to the car.

That was almost a week ago. Since then he hasn’t actually seen April cry, but she spends a lot of time cooped up in her room. He knocks and tells her when dinner’s ready, orders her favorite kind of pizza, and it’s almost nice having something else to worry about besides how he’ll get through tomorrow’s planning meeting without looking at Leslie.

When April does come out of her room, she tucks herself into the corner of the couch, scrunches her feet up under her and makes herself as tiny as possible. For whatever reason, it makes Ben sadder than pretty much anything else. She and Andy used to sprawl all over the place, take up as much room as possible just to piss him off, and now here she is with her arms hugged tight to her chest and it kind of makes Ben want to die.

Ben’s so busy staring at April’s knees that he almost doesn’t hear it when she finally says, “I think before her cooking career, Nigella Lawson probably did a lot of porn.”

April goes on to elaborate in very graphic detail the specific kinks Nigella was probably famous for, including some very interesting uses for her kitchen utensils. She doesn’t really crack much of a smile but Ben actually snorts into his beer when April lists the ten most erotic uses for a ladle. (“The ten _most_ erotic uses? Like there are more than ten kinky things to do with a giant soup spoon?” “Be more vanilla, Ben. Jesus.”) The corners of her mouth flicker up for just a second into something that is almost a smile.

And yeah, they’re two heartbroken people who spend a lot of time staring at walls and through tv screens, but it could be worse, right? Maybe the situation’s not as dire as it seems.

\--

Andy comes by the Parks Department so often, drops off flowers and balloons and teddy bears, that Ron actually has to sit him down and tell him to quit it. Ben walks by when the two of them are sitting in the chairs at the shoeshine stand and Andy’s immediately on his feet, half-chasing Ben down the hallway to ask about April.

Ben rubs a hand over his face and looks at the ground. He likes Andy, he really does, and god knows he never thought he was going to have to choose sides in this relationship (though he moved in with kids who got married after dating for three weeks, he should’ve at least considered the possibility that things were going to go horribly wrong) but he chooses April. He’s seen April’s face in the morning when she gets in the car to go to work, the extra few seconds she sits there after he turns off the engine where she shuts her eyes and steels herself for the walk into City Hall.

Yeah. He’s definitely siding with April.

But Andy’s still Andy, looking at Ben with those wide, puppy dog eyes, and he has to tell the guy _something_ , so Ben takes a deep breath and says, “Andy, you shouldn’t be asking me about April. I’m, I can’t, what am I supposed to say?”

“I just want to know how she’s doing.” And the thing is, Andy legitimately looks miserable. His eyes are red like he hasn’t been sleeping and there’s this vein in his neck that jumps a little bit while Andy stares at Ben and waits for him to answer.

Ben feels like he should ask how Andy’s doing or where he’s staying since April kicked him out but he knows April would kill him for even this much, so he just says, “She’s … she’s April. I don’t know. It just all kind of sucks.” Truer words were never spoken.

Andy starts to say something else but Ben begs off, heads for his two o’clock meeting. He spends the whole hour feeling like he’s betrayed April somehow. And it’s not exactly adequate amends but he makes a note to stop and pick up ice cream and movies on the way home. He’ll even pick out a chick flick, something with Ryan Reynolds, just so April can spend the night teasing him instead of staring off into space like she does so often lately.

\--

He comes into the Parks Department for a meeting and April’s working the front desk. She so focused on the computer screen that she doesn’t notice him walk in right away. He looks over her shoulder (maybe it’s unprofessional but it’s not like they have that many boundaries anymore) and sees she’s looking at graphics from her email.

_Leslie Knope for City Council._

He must make some noise, some awkward, awful noise, because she X’s out really quickly and spins to face him. And she almost looks guilty, almost looks ashamed, and they just stand there for a minute, staring at each other and not saying anything. And it’s weird that he’d even expect April’s loyalty, that he’d expect April to side with him the way that he sided with her. After a minute, she rolls her eyes and shoulders past him, heads for her desk to grab her notebook and pen. He spends the meeting not looking at Leslie, staring at the doodles April’s drawing in the margins of her notebook instead.

_Leslie Knope for City Council._

That night, when April’s tucked up into her corner of the couch with her computer on her lap, he manages to just go for broke and swan dive into full-on self-punishment. They’re watching some shitty reality show full of people who are clearly awful at whatever they think they’re great at, which April usually finds hilarious but now seems to find only mildly entertaining, and Ben chews on the words for a full half-hour before he asks, “Can I see them?”

April doesn’t even look over at him. “See what?”

Ben watches some blond guy wipe out on stage, totally eat shit in front of a giant crowd, and doesn’t even manage a giggle. “Can I see her campaign posters?”

April’s fingers go really still on her keyboard and she gets the same almost-guilty expression she had in the office and she won’t quite look at him. And he knows it’s not fair to expect her to choose him in the nonexistent battle of Wyatt vs. Knope, knows that she admires Leslie, respects her, loves her even. But her voice is really quiet when she says, “Ben, don’t--” and from April that almost feels like compassion.

“Just, just for a minute,” he says. And even to himself, he sounds so fucking sad, so fucking desperate. Get it together, Wyatt. Fuck.

When she finally slides the computer over to him, she pulls her knees to her chest, wraps her arms around her shins and doesn’t look at him. He flips through the files, a bunch of different poster layouts, graphics for what might be a campaign website. They’re really good. He’s seen a few graphic design books floating around the house, but he can tell this is something she’s really good at, can see the ways her twisted mind can twist just so into creative and crazy and awesome ideas.

He focuses on the colors and fonts April’s using instead of the ten thousand “Vote Knope!” images all over everything. It’s probably a defense mechanism. Part of it’s Leslie, part of it’s Partridge, and all of it’s fucking awful. This shouldn’t feel so much like completely starting over, but it does.

He looks at everything two, three, four times, then closes the laptop and slides it back across the couch, stands up in the same motion and heads toward the fridge. He grabs a beer for himself and another for April, twists off the caps and lobs them in the trash.

When he holds out the beer she finally looks up at him, eyes not so much guilty anymore as sympathetic which is somehow a lot worse. She just stares at him and his hand tightens around the bottle. “You want it or not?”

She reaches out finally and her fingers slide against his, against the drops of condensation on his skin, and while she spends the next hour watching talentless people moan and cry onscreen, he spends the next hour watching her.

\--

To be clear: this is not Ben’s first bad break-up. He lived on the road long enough that goodbyes were always necessary, always expected, just a natural part of his routine. And sure, some goodbyes were harder than others, but this. This is so much worse. This is like trying to put down roots and finding out not one fucking thing will grow here.

And it’s not that he stayed in Pawnee just for Leslie, because he didn’t. When he and Leslie broke up, he probably said it a thousand times, until it felt really, really true. He didn’t stay for Leslie. He stayed for him, for a chance to finally shrug off Mean Ben and be somebody worthwhile again, somebody who did things for people just because he could, somebody people liked and cared about.

Maybe that’s what makes it worse. That he’s not even really mad at Leslie (because honestly, what would he have done in the same situation?); now it’s all turned around on him until it’s all his fault.

He lays awake at night and tries not to think about history repeating itself.

All he comes up with is: _Blonde, Town Give Ice Clown Permanent Frown._

God. Even his jokes are fucking terrible.

\--

The thing is, Leslie keeps trying to make it better. She keeps overcompensating, keeps being way too nice and friendly and it’s just about the most awful thing in the world. She always asks his opinion on things when they have group meetings, very pointedly trying to prove to the world that nothing is going on between them, nothing was ever going on between them, they’re just coworkers and sometimes friends and everything is fine.

Everything is not fine. Ben’s a professional, sure, but there’s only so long he can keep his lips in a tight smile before they twist into a grimace and nothing seems to be getting any easier the more everybody’s conversation starts to revolve around Leslie’s campaign.

And then there’s Chris, fucking Chris who should’ve seen this coming, who spent so long telling Ben and Leslie that they were wonderful together, his superstars, his magical duo, that the fact that they were also crazy about each other should’ve registered on at least some level. But as much as Chris can work a room of a hundred people, the finer nuances of one-on-one relationships escape him, which is never more obvious than when he schedules a meeting to tell Ben and Leslie that they’re heading up the Harvest Festival again this year, both of them on point, and they should get started right away. Ben’s never really hit a guy before, but he understands the impulse now because the prospect of spending however many afternoons cooped up with Leslie and two dozen file folders is excruciating. It’s maybe the worst meeting Ben’s ever been a part of, and he had to stare at pictures of his impeachment hearing in the Partridge papers for fucking _weeks_.

After Chris finally lets them leave (it’s time for his daily sprints up all four flights of stairs at the back of the building), Leslie follows Ben to his desk. “So we’ll meet this afternoon then? Start looking at all the funding information? I’ve got binders of ideas, all sorts of plans.”

Ben sits down in his chair and stares at his blotter for awhile before he manages to look up and meet her eyes. And it’s not that they haven’t interacted since everything went to shit, but he’s pretty sure this is the first time they’ve been totally alone since they broke up and the room feels kind of like it’s collapsing in on itself. He really should’ve known better than to fall so hard for a coworker, because this ungodly feeling in his chest is apparently all he’s got to look forward to for the foreseeable future. Jesus. He cannot catch a fucking break. “Yeah,” he finally answers, and he can tell from the way her smile is way too wide that he’s taken far too long to answer such a simple question. “Yeah, we can use the conference room on the second floor. I’ll meet you there.”

Leslie nods her head and spins on her heel and then she’s gone. He spends the next three hours making mistakes on his paperwork and miscalculating basic budgetary problems. He contemplates for the hundredth time just quitting, moving back to Indianapolis and calling it a day, but that’s apparently his line in the sand. So he stares at the clock until two and then heads to the second floor with all the budget info tucked under his arm.

Even though he spent a half hour deciding exactly how on-time to be, when he gets to the conference room, Leslie’s not there. Which is ridiculous because Leslie’s always ten minutes early for things and he expected her binders to already be set up and graphs and charts and mock-ups to be pinned to the whiteboard. Instead there’s just silence and an empty room. He waits for ten minutes before he sucks it up and heads down to Leslie’s office, and when he gets there she’s elbow-deep in binders. Some are piled on the floor, some on Tom’s still-empty desk. He stands in the doorway for a second and watches her, then clears his throat loud enough to get her attention.

“Hey!” she says when she sees him. “I was about to leave for the meeting and suddenly I couldn’t find my binders. So I came back in here to look for them and I was sure they were next to the zoo expansion project binder. Did I tell you about that? Adding an aquarium? With manatees and sting rays and dolphins?” Ben just stares at her. “Don’t worry, we’ll get the dolphins trained, it’ll be great.”

God. He’s suddenly so grateful to whatever deity lost those binders that he fights off a visible sigh of relief. His voice is almost steady when he says, “So we’ll just reschedule. I’m sure they’ll turn up.”

“Okay.” For the briefest of moments, he thinks he sees a flicker of disappointment wash across Leslie’s face. And even though he tries not to hold her decision against her, he hasn’t spent a lot of time cutting her any slack for how this whole thing’s affecting her. They stare at each other just a little too long until suddenly April’s nudging past him into Leslie’s office, saying, “Leslie, if you aren’t going to this thing with Ben, you can go to the rezoning meeting Ron was supposed to go to.”

Leslie perks up a little. “Rezoning? Does he have notes?” April doesn’t answer because of course the answer is no, and while Leslie goes to her desk to get her things together for the meeting Ron probably never planned on going to anyway, Ben turns to leave. He stops when he sees April’s face because it’s almost devious, but not in the usual way. She’s nearly got those same sympathetic eyes she gives him sometimes when she thinks he can’t see her. And suddenly he’s sure he knows exactly what happened to Leslie’s binders. It’s the weirdest thing to realize that somehow they’ve turned into a unit, April and Ben, watching each others’ backs because there’s no one else around to watch out for anymore. He tries to smile at her just a little as a thank you but as soon as he does she shoulders past him back to her desk.

He tries to thank her again during the car ride home. She doesn’t let him get more than the first syllable out before she’s rambling about some stupid thing Jerry did today and just when he thinks he’s gotten the message loud and clear, Ben finds a key hanging around his bedroom doorknob when he heads to bed that night. They’ve been watching Lifetime movies, the horribly hilarious ones about stalker boyfriends and bad teachers, and there’s a key on a silver chain swinging from the doorknob.

April’s just ducking into her room but when he calls out, “What’s this to?” she stops and looks back at him.

“One of the empty offices on the fourth floor.”

Ben knows better than to try to say thank you, so he plays dumb instead. “What’s in one of the empty offices on the fourth floor?” And even though he knows when he goes up there tomorrow he’ll find Leslie’s binders, color-coded and perfectly organized, he asks anyway.

April doesn’t answer though, just kind of shrugs in a way that’ll have to substitute for “You’re welcome.”

It’s the first night in a long time that Ben heads to bed with a smile on his face.

\--

Some days are better than others. Sometimes he lets himself sleep in on Saturday morning, wake up late and read the paper in the backyard, listen to the ballgame on the radio. The simple things that’ve always made him happiest. April sometimes comes outside, plops down not too far away from him and reads books he’s never heard of, puts on her headphones and looks almost peaceful.

Then July is two straight weeks of rain and it casts a cloud over everything. Both their tempers run shorter, until they’re fighting in the kitchen over who drank the last of the milk, who didn’t run the dishwasher, why there’s never anything good on tv. Everything feels fuzzy and dank, like whatever breeze blew through and made them feel almost normal again has been replaced by too much rain with no end in sight. Andy takes a job at the hospital. Ben has no idea if he and Ann are still doing whatever it is that got them in this mess in the first place but April’s mood when she finds out is a pretty clear indication that she’s fucking pissed either way. And Ben eventually makes April give the binders back so now he and Leslie have been spending hours in whatever conference room they can get ahold of, planning vendor placement and wrangling corporate sponsorships. It’s so much like last year it hurts.

One night there’s a thunderstorm so intense it actually shakes Ben awake and when he goes to the kitchen for a glass of water, he sees April in the living room. All the lights are still off and she’s got one of the kitchen chairs pulled up to the windows, the curtains thrown open and the windows cracked. Her knees are pulled to her chest and he can’t see her face because she doesn’t turn to look at him, probably doesn’t even know he’s there. There’s something so sad about the shape of her, the lines of her back and the slouch to her shoulders, that he goes back to his room without water, stretches out in the middle of the bed and just lays there, listening to the storm, wondering what exactly it is they’re both waiting for.

\--

April’s shockingly good at Jeopardy. It’s not something Ben would’ve guessed about her before he moved in, but April’s actually a sponge for random facts and trivia. And it’s not exactly that they’ve turned watching it into a competition, but maybe Ben mentally keeps score. She beats him a lot more often than not.

They’re halfway through Double Jeopardy one night when April slides over from her corner of the couch, turns herself the wrong way around and just stares at him. He tries to ignore her because she used to do this sometimes, stare at him and sit too close just to make him squirm, and he’d gotten really good at ignoring her before she disappeared into her tiny corner of unhappiness at the other end of the couch. She’s not looking at him like she’s trying to fuck with him, though, purposely getting between him and the screen or anything.

Ben’s doing a pretty good job of keeping his eyes on the tv until April slides a hand up his thigh. “What the fuck?” Her hand’s almost in his fucking crotch and he just gapes at her. She blinks a few times, then flicks her eyes down to his mouth and flexes her fingers against his leg. She looks old and sad, and when she shifts her eyes to look at the wall, he knows she’s looking right at the place a Mouse Rat poster used to be and it twists him up inside. “April, what are you--?”

“Don’t you just not want to feel like shit for awhile?” she says. Her eyes crinkle a little at the corners but her voice is steady, almost flat, and maybe that’s worse, maybe this is as bad as it gets for the both of them and anything else is just damage control. Suddenly he wants to give her anything she wants, just to get her to stop looking at him like that, so when she leans in and presses her mouth to his, he doesn’t pull away. Her lips are warm and kind of frantic, almost desperate and a little bit rough, and everything about it is all so _April_ that when she slides her tongue along his lip, he opens his mouth and lets her kiss him.

She pulls back finally and he’s still got a grip on her wrist. She doesn’t push toward him and she doesn’t pull away. She just stares at him, her face inches from his, and the second he loosens his grip (and it’s just for a second, just the tiniest bit, and even if that’s not exactly true, when he thinks about it later it’ll make it all feel a little less lecherous on his end) she works her hand into his pants and curls her fingers around him. She kisses him again, once, then slides her lips along his jaw and licks at the spot just beneath it. He leans his head back and even though this is probably ten times worse than every other bad idea he’s ever had, he doesn’t stop her.

She uses her hand until he’s hard and then pulls away and stands up. She pulls down her shorts and underwear, these pink things with white stripes and it’s so fucking youthful and sweet it feels wrong. He almost says so, almost tells her to forget it, forget him, he’ll move out in the morning and never, ever come back, but then she leans over and presses a wet kiss to the underside of his jaw again, grabs the waistband of his pants with both hands and tugs them down to his knees.

She crawls into his lap but his hands are still useless at his sides and when he stutters to life and brings them to her shoulders, he’s not sure if he’s pushing her away or pulling her closer. She’s got her hand around his dick, supporting herself on her knees while she guides him to just the right spot. He finds his voice finally and tightens his hands around her arms. “April, we shouldn’t--”

But she fists her other hand in his hair, whispers, “Jesus, just shut the fuck up,” and kisses him again as she sinks down on the head of his cock and Jesus Christ. She just stays there with her forehead pressed against his temple and it’s so fucking unbearable for a million different reasons, so desperate and needy and even though it shouldn’t be, it’s fucking amazing. She’s not very wet at first, so it takes a few tries, a few thrusts until everything works itself out, but then he’s all the way inside her and it feels better than pretty much anything that’s happened to him in the past few weeks.

He doesn’t move for a minute, suddenly filled with rational thoughts like workplace policy and condoms, but fucking Chris can go to hell and Ben sees her take her birth control pills every morning before they leave for work, and when April rolls her hips into him, she leans her head back a little and shuts her eyes and she looks so damn relieved, almost _happy_ , and he can’t help himself. He thrusts up into her and tugs at the hem of her shirt. When she shifts away to pull it over her head, she braces her hands on his chest and keeps moving her hips, puts her head down so her hair falls all around her face. Ben reaches out to push it back, to tuck it behind her ear, but she shakes him off, pushes his hand away and lifts herself up, slides back down again so slowly that Ben leans his head back and curses, strings of nonsense words and random syllables. April just makes these little noises in the back of her throat and every once in awhile, when he hits a particular angle, she lets out a breathy moan that makes him tighten his fingers around her thighs.

She tugs his face back up toward her but doesn’t lean in to kiss him, just settles her hands under his ears for a second and looks him in the eyes. It’s weird and intimate and really uncomfortable and April bites her lip and leans in to rest her forehead against his neck. And god, she’s hot and tight around him, moving up and down like this, and his hands are everywhere, on her hips and the small of her back and tangling in the ends of her hair. Her nipples keep brushing against his chest and he reaches up to grab her breast and that’s when it hits him all at once, how different she is from Leslie, how much smaller, more compact. April’s all angles where Leslie’s curves and it’s a thought that makes feel Ben feel fucking terrible.

April starts speeding up, rolling her hips and bouncing herself up and down on his dick, and when she slips a finger into her mouth for just a second before dropping it down to rub at her clit, her hand jammed in between their bodies, it’s by some miracle of god that Ben manages not to come until April’s clutching at his shoulders and finally collapsing down against him. He thrusts up a few more times, finally comes with one of his hands around her knee, one against the back of her neck.

They both just stay like that, all heavy breathing and tangled limbs. They don’t say anything and honestly, there isn’t much to say. April’s chest is kind of sweaty against his and her face feels hot against his shoulder. He drops his hand from her neck to the arm of the couch, the other still tight around her knee, but when she moves her hands to the back of the couch and pushes herself up off him, he lets go of her altogether, just sits there with his t-shirt on and his pants somewhere between his knees and his ankles. April’s stark naked in front of him and somehow manages to look more dignified, not totally composed but way more together than he is. She doesn’t say anything, just kind of purses her lips and then reaches down to pick up her shirt and shorts and underwear, turns around and heads for the bathroom.

“Order a pizza,” she says over her shoulder.

Oh. There’s that third shoe. Ben should’ve fucking known.

\--

After that first time, Ben swears it isn’t going to happen again, writes it off as a mistake, a lapse in judgment, a sign that he really needs to get his shit together and act his age. He spends the whole day after it happens holed up in his office, not leaving his desk unless absolutely necessary, and he gives the Parks Department a wide berth. He briefly considers getting his own place, but when he mentions it to April in the car Friday morning (two days after he fucked her on the sofa, his fairly guilt conscience helpfully fills in for him), she keeps staring out the window and says, “You can’t leave, you signed a lease.”

Ben changes lanes and the guy behind him leans on his horn (douchebag). “I actually didn’t.”

“Whatever.” April jerks his rearview mirror down to check her hair, though really it’s just to annoy him. “I can’t afford the rent on my own. You can’t leave.”

Ben jerks the mirror back into place. “Get roommates.”

They stop at a red light and he can feel April staring at him. He fights to keep his eyes straight ahead because he can’t look at her without thinking about the faces she made while she was on top of him, the way she felt against his chest and around his cock, and Jesus, he could get hard just thinking about it now and he’s almost 36 years old. This is a problem.

He’s so busy _not_ thinking about having sex with April that he misses the green light and the guy behind him honks again (giant douchebag). Ben pulls into the intersection and he’s about to tell April the many benefits of socializing with people from her own peer group when she says, in this awful, quiet voice, “I don’t like anyone else.”

Ben doesn’t have anything to say to that because for April it’s practically begging him to stay, which she would never do. It’s not a long drive from the house to City Hall and he doesn’t spend the rest of it thinking about having sex with April. He spends the rest of it thinking about her in other moments, like early in the morning before she’s had her first cup of coffee or late at night when she tries to fight off sleep, when she keeps forcing her eyes open and jerking her head back up to the tv. And he knows she’s probably doing it for the same reason he is, because the prospect of going to bed alone with just his own miserable mind for company is the single-most unappealing idea in the world and even if they’re miserable, it’s better being miserable together than being miserable alone.

He’s pulling into the parking lot before he realizes he’s halfway to rationalizing sleeping with her again. This is a big fucking problem.

\--

Harvest Festival meetings are always the worst part of Ben’s day. Leslie and her department already had a lot of stuff in place before Ben even got involved, but now it’s time to get down to brass tacks: getting all the vendors in line, making sure the security will be tight enough to keep Pikitis and the raccoons out again this year. And it’s not that the work is hard (it’s easy enough to take the framework from last year, but Leslie’s adamant that there should be new stuff too, so people are excited to come back again) but just, God. Every time he thinks about last year’s Festival, about everything it meant to him then, it’s like a tiny reminder of all the ways it fell apart.

It’s a particularly difficult Friday meeting and everybody’s over-tired and itching to leave and Leslie keeps trying to nail down the plans for the [Indian] display. Ben finally snaps, loses it, yells, “Leslie, it doesn’t fucking matter if the fonts on the banners and the wall displays match!” Leslie shuts up and Jerry and Donna are wide-eyed and silent and April’s sitting at her desk watching it all go down. The minute he says it, Ben feels like the world’s biggest asshole. He tries to backtrack but Leslie shuts him down, tells everyone they can pick this up on Monday and heads to her office. It’s the first time he’s ever yelled at her. Even when they were breaking up, he was pretty quiet about it, already resigned from the second she told him about the campaign.

He spends the drive home mentally berating himself, because even if it wasn’t intensely dickish, it was totally unprofessional and Jesus, what’s wrong with him? Why can’t he get a handle on himself? He’s a grown fucking man, not some heartbroken kid. He’s not 18 anymore. This isn’t Partridge. April keeps her eyes fixed out the window and won’t look at him, doesn’t even comment when he runs a yellow light, then two, and brakes way too hard when he finally pulls into the driveway.

April takes the keys out of his hand when he misses the lock on the front door for the second time. She pushes the door open and he follows her inside, sinks back against the wall the second he’s in the house. April just stands there and stares at him, chews her lip and waits for him to say something, but he doesn’t have anything to say because fuck it, seriously, fuck all of it, and then he’s pushing her up against the living room wall, his lips on hers and his hands already working up under her shirt. She scrambles her hands against his back, fists one around his tie and pulls him toward her and from there it’s just desperate and rushed. Ben slams his knee into the coffee table when April’s walking them back toward the couch and he can’t get the button on her jeans undone, but eventually they’re as naked as they need to be and he’s got two fingers inside of her while she runs her thumb over the head of his cock. Neither of them says a word. And she stills gets that happy relieved look on her face when he slides into her which is somehow even hotter than it was last time and he keeps his head buried in her shoulder while she wraps her legs around his waist. It doesn’t even last as long as the first time which Ben would feel self-conscious about if he weren’t so busy feelings a thousand other things. April digs a heel into his ass when she arches her back and comes and he holds on for another few thrusts before he’s collapsing down on top of her.

It’s a few seconds before Ben can get his breathing back under control and when he lifts himself off April, she’s just looking at him like she can’t decide exactly what to think. She purses her lips and says, “Well. Looks like Mean Ben’s back.”

Fucking great.

\--

It gets to be kind of a habit after that. They go a few days where everything is normal and then April climbs into his lap during a commercial break and they fuck during the eleven o’clock news, or he catches her on her way out of the bathroom, pins her against the wall and slides his hand into her shorts. It’s by no means the most romantic relationship he’s been in. Not that he’s under any sort of delusion that what they’re doing could even passably be called a relationship.

Eventually April starts to get bossy, starts to tell him exactly what she likes, guides his hands or his mouth with more force than is probably necessary, but it’s so unlike Leslie that Ben can’t help but feel grateful. Leslie never said much of anything beyond, “Oh, Ben,” or “Oh, god,” but April says all sorts of things: how she’d let him bend her over her desk at work, how that’s probably what she’ll be thinking about during his one o’clock meeting with Ron tomorrow, and how she’s sure that’s all he’ll be thinking about now too. And it might be just to fuck with him, but god help him, if it makes him focus a little less on all the ways he misses Leslie than he’ll never tell her to stop.

It’s a welcome distraction, even if it makes Ben feel like the worst kind of asshole, like the biggest dick on the planet. Still, it’s a break from feeling like a victim, like a sad-sack sorry loser, and Ben’ll take what he can get these days.

April has somehow managed to remain entirely cool about the whole thing, and how she can go down on him in the shower before work and glare at him indifferently from behind her desk is something he’ll never quite understand, but if she has trouble getting through meetings with Leslie, she certainly doesn’t tell him.

And the sex, well. It’s good. Ben spent the last 12 years on the road, so deep connection isn’t something he got particularly accustomed to. (Leslie was the exception, not the rule, but that’s true of so many other things besides his sex life. He has the feeling April could say the same thing about Andy, but the totality of what April says about Andy is pretty fucking negligible.)

They never do it in their bedrooms. He eats her out on the living room sofa and bends her over the kitchen table, sure, but apparently seeing his bedroom furniture is too much, which isn’t something he’s entirely aware of until he’s dragging her down the hallway toward his room and she stops him short, spins him and pushes him against the bathroom door.

“I’m not going to fuck you on your Superman sheets,” she says, and he’s about to reply, about to tell her he’s a full-grown adult, fuck you very much, but then she’s on her knees in front of him and she blows him right there outside the bathroom, his fingers tightening around the door handle when he comes.

He doesn’t try to take her back to his room again, and she never, ever pulls him back toward hers.

\--

Ron doesn’t usually participate in the Harvest Festival meetings beyond a grunt or a request for more meat-specific food carts, so when he catches Ben coming out of the conference room and says, “Can I have a word?” Ben is adequately wary.

When he gets in Ron’s office, all he can think about is April, that she said something, that Ron somehow found out, but Ben’s been extra careful to keep his phone out of his back pocket. Still, there’s an awful lot of artillery in Ron’s office.

“Ben, I want to talk to you about April.” Oh, holy shit. There’s a shotgun. And a grenade. This has to be against some sort of city code. There are little pinpricks of moisture on Ben’s forehead and god, Ron’s going to kill him. Ron is actually going to kill him. “Is she okay?”

“Excuse me?”

It’s not what Ben was expecting Ron to say and for a second or two he’s sure he’s heard him wrong, but Ron leans over again and says, “Is she okay?”

Ben keeps his eyes firmly on Ron’s shotgun and tries to think of something, anything to say that isn’t, “Yeah, she’s fine, my penis is a cure-all and I’m totally fucking her, is that all?” Instead he says, “Yeah, she’s fine.” Nothing about his penis. Well played, Wyatt.

Ron must be able to tell that Ben’s nervous because he leans forward and lowers his voice, gets all conspiratorial and concerned and says, “I’d never want to do anything that would encourage April to be better at her job, but she’s a smart girl and she took this thing with Andy pretty hard. Love makes us all her bitch eventually.” And he’s got this sympathetic look on his face too, like he knows about everything with Leslie and truth be told, he probably does.

Oh. Genuine concern. That makes Ben feel even worse. If he had to answer honestly, he has no idea how April’s doing, though if she’s anything like him (and he’s come to realize that they have more than a few personality traits in common, despite appearances) she’s not doing that great. But he smiles at Ron, tries to sound as genuine as possible. “She’s fine, you know, she’s a tough girl, she’ll be okay.” He can’t quite manage the lie for himself.

\--

They’re eating Domino’s for the third time in a week and they’ve been watching a Top Chef marathon for four hours. Number of times Ben’s left the house today: zero. Number of times Ben’s left the house since he got home from work yesterday: zero. His joints feel wooden, his chest feels stiff. His ass hurts from too much sitting. They’re out of beer and there’s no ice cream.

Ben reaches over to grab the remote and turns off the tv.

“Hey,” April says, “Jamie was about to do something bitchy. Turn it back on.”

Ben slides his hands over his knees and stands up. “We need to get out of this house.”

April just rolls her eyes and sighs. “There’s nothing to do around here.”

“Whatever, it doesn’t matter. We just need to--come on.” She gives him the look she sometimes gives him when he orders her around, a look he imagines her parents got a lot when she was growing up and it makes him feel old and pervy so he says, “Get your ass off the couch.” He goes to his room, puts on jeans and a t-shirt and brushes his teeth. God, is this the first time he’s brushed his teeth all day? He needs to get a fucking grip.

When he comes back out to the living room April’s still sitting in the same spot on the couch only now she’s got on jeans and a tank top, this little strappy pink thing that makes him want to run his tongue along her collarbone. And even though he usually gives in to his inappropriate April urges lately, he doesn’t do that, doesn’t push her back against the cushions and slide his knee between her thighs. Instead he grabs his keys, says, “Come on,” and heads for the door.

They drive around for awhile with the windows down. Ben suggests different places to go (the ice cream place across town, or there’s bound to be some movie playing where they can at least watch shit blow up for a few hours) but April shoots them all down, and it’s never been until this moment that Ben’s considered how cut-off they both are from other people. April hasn’t gone out with friends in months. Ben doesn’t hardly even talk to Tom anymore. It’s pretty fucking pathetic that the most frequently called number on his contacts list is his mom. Jesus.

So Ben just drives aimlessly, bopping his head to whatever terrible music April put on when they got in the car. Then she says, “Pull in here,” and points to the parking lot of The Bulge. Ben pulls in and parks but doesn’t take off his seatbelt.

“Really? The Bulge?”

April gives him a look. “You’re the one who wanted to leave the fucking house so bad.” And then she’s out of the car and halfway across the parking lot and really, she’s got a point. There isn’t anything to do in this town.

Everything about The Bulge is just the way he remembers it: really fucking gay. April orders him a beer and herself a shot, this disgusting-looking green thing with sugar on the rim. She knocks it back and orders another and then drags him out to the dance floor.

“April, I don’t dance.” She should know that. She’s met him before. He’s exactly as awkward as he looks.

She rolls her eyes and shrugs. “Fine, then get me another drink.” He gets her another shot, pink this time. A blond guy offers to buy him a drink. It’s the best part of his day so far.

He doesn’t head back to the dance floor with his drinks. He heads to a booth in the corner instead, sits down and watches the room. (Yes, he realizes he’s still just sitting around, but at least this booth doesn’t have a permanent impression of his ass like the couch back at the house does.) April’s in the middle of the dance floor by herself, bouncing up and down on her toes in time with the music. It’s bass-y and pounding and it thuds in his chest, but in a way that’s less irritating than the fact that it just makes him feel kind of alive, almost young and a little bit reckless.

He watches her out there, swaying back and forth with her eyes half-closed, her hair swinging down around her shoulders. She’s beautiful. And even though he’s currently fucking her a couple times a week, that’s not something he thinks all that often, even though it’s true. She was beautiful at her wedding and she was beautiful after, the way she smiled at Andy, the way she cared about things. He’s not sure which is the real April, whether she’s naturally as sullen and dour as she’s been the past few weeks or whether she’s more like the way she was when Andy was around. He has a sneaking suspicion it’s the latter and he suddenly realizes what a big fucking lie he told Ron. Neither of them are doing fine.

He watches her dance for a long time, the way her skin gets sweaty and reflects all the different colored lights. By the time she comes over to get her shot her hair’s started to curl a little at her temples. She slides in next to him, lines them up hip to hip and knee to knee. It’s closer than he’d usually let her get in public, but he doesn’t pull away.

“We should do this more often,” he says. It’s like if he could just make her smile or laugh then everything would be better for the both of them.

April just shrugs disinterestedly and throws back her shot. “Whatever.” She leans back in the booth and tilts her head all the way back. Ben wants to kiss his way up the line of her neck, wants to shove her out the door and take her out of town, far away from all the things that’ve ever hurt her. The urge isn’t romantic or idealistic so much as it is cowardly. As if there’s any place they could run that all their bullshit wouldn’t follow, and he’s spent enough time running from his problems to know exactly how much good it does.

So instead he drains the last of his beer and nudges April’s knee. “Come on,” he says. “One dance.” She narrows her eyes but slides out of the booth, and even though he makes exactly as big an ass of himself as he expected to and April can’t stop rolling her eyes, the smile she gives him is almost worth it.

\--

After The Bulge, Ben decides to try harder to be a normal person, a functioning member of society, something other than a waste-of-space asshole. For every step Ben tries to take forward, April’s determined to take two steps back.

He wakes up in the morning and actually makes breakfast, scrambles eggs and fries bacon. He steers clear of waffles, sure, but give a guy some credit for trying.

Even though he makes enough for two, April stands at the counter and picks at a pop-tart. She throws her crusts at him and even though he’s somehow shaking crumbs out from under the flap of his collar in his mid-morning meeting, he doesn’t relent.

He turns off the tv and reads a book instead. April plugs her iPod into the speakers and cranks club music until he’s rocking a truly impressive headache.

“Jesus, Ben, this isn’t a library.” She’s got her hands on her hips and what he’s come to realize is the April version of a pout on her face. “‘Man vs. Food’ is on. Let’s go.”

Ben doesn’t look up from his book, like if he avoids eye-contact then winning this battle is just within his reach. “Why don’t you do something other than watch tv tonight? Don’t you have homework?”

“It’s July, asshole.”

The sex does not get more tender. Even if Ben tried, April has more tricks up her sleeve than any 22-year-old has a right to know. They have sex on the floor in the hallway, one night in the backseat of his car while it’s still parked in the garage. There’s a particularly memorable encounter after April brings home a “Vote Knope!” yard sign, proving that Ben’s new life-attitude only extends so far. Ben shoves the sign behind a cabinet, next to an old Slip ‘N Slide and a dusty lawn dart set.

So. Baby steps.

\--

Tom throws an Entertainment 720 party at the Snakehole. They’re promoting Dennis Feinstein’s new fragrance (and how he got away with the licensing for a perfume named “Sluts” is something Ben will never understand) and Tom’s convinced it’s a total coup, that it’s the thing that’s going to break them, send them into the multimedia conglomerate stratosphere. Those are the exact words he uses. The whole thing’s ridiculous.

Ben begs out early, has one beer and then sneaks out the front door. He doesn’t tell April he’s leaving.

He gets a text a half hour later. “Hey asshole, where are you?”

He’s well into his nightly routine now, sweatpants-ed and Food Network-ed, and he texts her back: “Home. Headache. Have fun.” And maybe he left because he’s 36 and the Snakehole is for twenty-somethings, because April _is_ a 20-something and should be out there having fun and living her life, not sitting at home feelings sorry for herself all the time. And it’s not that she’s not old enough to make her own decisions (god knows April Ludgate is perfectly capable of making up her own mind, and he’s got a hickey just above his collarbone to prove it) but still.

He gets a text back not two minutes later. “Fucker. Come back and get me.”

He waits almost ten minutes before he answers her and he spends that whole time thinking about the lights in her hair that night at the Bulge. “Can’t. Private time with Nigella. Sock’s on the door.”

She doesn’t text him again, but he hears her come in sometime after midnight (Donna was there to drive everyone home again) and he’s not sure, but she might be humming. He hopes she danced.

\--

Eventually Ben pushes it one step too far. (Truth be told, it’s probably, like, 30 steps too far, but he’s working with limited knowledge.) He finds the marshmallow gun under the sofa one afternoon while April’s at her parents’ house for some birthday party and he’s waiting on the couch when she gets home. Andy used to drag her into the living room on Saturday mornings to make blanket forts, and whatever new found energy Ben’s got, it doesn’t include blanket forts.

April comes in and shrugs her bag off her shoulder, walks toward the couch and then sees him. Everything in her face goes entirely still and her voice is oddly low when she asks, “What are you doing?”

Ben holds up the gun. There’s a bag of mini-marshmallows on the cushion next to him and he makes a truly awkward attempt at a smile. “I found this.”

April walks toward him and takes the gun from his hand. She’s really calm about it, so calm it’s almost creepy, and Ben watches her as she walks down the hallway and throws the gun in her room.

When she comes back, there’s something off about her face and Ben realizes that for as much time as he’s spent with April (on the couch, at work, inside her, whatever) there are whole parts of her he’s never gotten at. She stops a few feet from the couch.

“What are you doing?”

This is some sort of trap. He can’t see exactly how, but this is not going to go well. “I told you. I found it. It was under--”

But April shakes her head at him. “That’s not what I mean. These past few weeks, you’ve been, I don’t know.” Her hands are just hanging there at her sides, and god. She’s so young. “I don’t need your help.” Her voice cracks. Jesus, what the hell did he step in?

“We both need _something_.” That much is pretty fucking obvious. April's more tense than he’s ever seen her.

She bites off her words and her hands are balled into fists. “And what, you think _you’re_ the something I need?”

Woah. Not the point. “I never said that.”

“But you think that if I’m all better then suddenly _you’re_ all better? You can’t even put up a fucking yard sign.” April’s voice is a lot more flippant than she probably feels given the fact that she looks about ready to burst into tears.

And that isn’t what he’s been doing. Is that what he’s been doing? Using April as a pathetic proxy so he can pretend he has his shit together? He starts toward the garage. “You want me to put up the yard sign? Fine.”

But April’s in his way and she doesn’t budge an inch. “I want you to stop treating me like solving all my problems somehow solves all of yours.”

“That’s not what I’m doing.” And so what if it is? At least he's _trying_ , or _trying to try_. Whatever. _Fuck._

“Bullshit. Why do you even have to mess with things?”

And Ben doesn’t care that it’s almost certainly misdirected anger because they’ve spent so long just simmering in their own juices, stewing in each others’ misery, that the explosion feels fucking _great_ and finally raising his voice is the best he’s felt in weeks. “Because we’re both miserable." He’s just so fucking _angry_ all of a sudden, and it’s the first time he hasn’t tried to stifle it with a clipped smile or inappropriate sex. "Jesus, April, isn’t not giving a shit just fucking exhausting?”

April huffs out a breath and shakes her head and he can see her get a handle on whatever made her so unhinged, reign back in whatever had her so close to actually being _vulnerable_. She spins on her heel and heads to her room and whatever tenuous thing they had going, it's snapped right the fuck in two.

_Ice Clown Gets Kicked While Down._

Great.

\--

They don’t speak to each other for a week. At work, she calls him Mr. Wyatt.

Probably just to spite him, April throw herself into Leslie’s campaign. Elections are in October, so they have two months to get her name out there, make the community aware of the fact that she’s more than just “Parks Lady” now. It’s part of the reason Leslie’s so stressed out about Harvest Festival, like, if it tanks right before the election then she’s got absolutely no chance. And it’s not that Leslie tries to put more pressure on everybody else but she can do 200 things at once and expects that much of everyone else too. It’s more than a little wearing.

April takes to it like a fiend. Spends more time at Leslie’s house doing campaign things, more time canvassing and dragging people to events. And even though Ben’s 99% sure she started out doing it just to fuck with him (he’s come home to “Vote Knope!” pamphlets so many times in the past week he’s lost count, and the pile of signs behind the cabinet in the garage is getting pretty impressive), he can tell she likes it. And maybe that has something to do with him, with what he said to her, because it’s obvious that she _does_ care, not just about Leslie winning, but about Leslie.

Ben does not miss the irony in the fact that all his honest effort got him nowhere and getting her mad enough to scream at him seems to have done the fucking trick.

If any of what he said got to April, it’s no doubt that he took her words to heart. After a dozen failed attempts at being a contributing member of society, Ben has to admit what a sham it was before, how focused he was on making April feel better instead of actually focusing on his own problems. As if making breakfast and trying to get April out of the house didn’t just mean he had a lot of time on his hands to be the same cranky bastard as before.

He tries going out with Tom but spends most of the night pissed at the fact that if April were with him, she could help him decide whether or not Tom’s wearing a woman’s blazer and when he gets home that night, he can’t help but check for a sliver of light from under April’s bedroom door.

And maybe checking up on April is falling right back into old patterns, but still. Baby steps.

\--

He comes back late from work one night and April’s sitting on the couch with her laptop cycling through a bunch of songs. She doesn’t really look at him when he comes in. She’s been doing that for a week, not really talking to him, being ambivalently hostile. He’s been working his way through a Pamela Dean cookbook (and telling himself it counts as making an effort) while she sits at the table and throws her wadded up McDonald’s wrappers at his back. It’s super fucking awesome.

Some Beyonce song (it’s probably Beyonce, it’s maybe Rihanna, he’s a full grown man, he isn’t supposed to know these things) is blaring from her laptop and Ben’s halfway to his room when April says, “I’m picking a new campaign song for Leslie, want to help?”

Two months ago she wouldn’t let him look at the campaign posters without a heaping serving of pity on the side. Now she’s shoving it in his face and loving it. Her mouth’s twisted into this half-formed smile and it’s so fucking ugly, so fucking wrong, that Ben turns around and sits down on the couch right next to her. “We should look for something to appeal to the youth vote, I think.” He leans over and clicks on a song, something peppy and fast that he’s never heard before and bops his head along with the beat. “What about this one?”

April changes it to another, and then another, and they go back and forth like that. Ben snaps his fingers, says things like, “This one doesn’t quite capture Leslie’s pep.” Or “I think ‘Let me see them Hanes’ is just Leslie’s message in a nutshell.”

And then April scrolls down and clicks and it’s “Whoomp! There It Is.” She’s not smiling anymore. She’s looking at him like it’s painful, all wide eyes and pursed lips, and he knows she knows exactly what she’s doing, that she googled him back during all that Crazy Ira bullshit and some things just stuck, because she’s April and that’s just how she is.

He wants to say something biting to one-up her, maybe lean over and play a Mouse Rat song, but instead he just taps the space bar and the room’s really quiet all of a sudden.

Of all the things Ben tried to pull April out of her funk, genuine honesty was never one of them. His tongue sticks in his throat a little bit when he tries to talk. “You know, I spent 18 years running away from the worst thing that ever happened to me. I didn’t go back to Partridge for a decade after I went away to school.” April doesn’t pull her laptop away or anything, doesn’t give him the finger and run away to her room, so he keeps talking. “It’s just a shit-ton of wasted time, after awhile.”

For them, it’s almost sentimental. When he looks over, April’s looking at him--actually looking at him--and it’s a whole lot more intimate than the month and a half he spent fucking her. She’s so fucking full of promise it’s unbearable and the feeling that comes to life in Ben’s chest feels a lot less like sympathy than affection. He leans over and taps the space bar but when he gets up off the couch and goes toward his room, April pauses the music again. “Do you think you loved her?”

April’s voice is tiny and genuine and when he looks back at her, she’s as vulnerable as she was the night they fought. There’s no heat now though, just genuine curiosity and something that looks an awful lot like guilt.

Ben turns around and slides his hands into his pockets. He doesn’t let himself think about it too often because it’s literally the most depressing thing in the world to think about, whether or not he loves Leslie when they’re not even together anymore. Sometimes he thinks yes, sometimes he thinks no. Sometimes he think he fell in love with a lot of things, Pawnee and his job and the way the town made him feel, but when he looks at all of that hard enough it’s really just Leslie all over again. So he just shrugs a shoulder and says, “I don’t know. I definitely don’t love feeling like this all the time.”

It may not be profound but it at least has the benefit of being true.

\--

They have a sort of truce after that. Ben stops pushing so hard and April stops fighting and they’re just kind of _doing it_ , just being real people. April even comes into the kitchen to “help out” with the cooking, which mostly consists of stealing bits of carrot off the cutting board and calling him Benjy Crocker. She sits on the counter and tells him all about the new porn series she’s thought of, Ben and Nigella and all sorts of world cuisine and sexual positions he’s pretty sure are physically impossible. And when Ben leans over and lobs the ladle at her, cocks an eyebrow and winks, April huffs out a laugh that’s the best thing Ben’s heard in a long fucking time.

He wakes up one Sunday morning and April’s sprawled out on the sofa watching tv. He makes a cup of coffee, a few pieces of toast, and when he takes them into the living room, April doesn’t look at him but she does slide her feet off the cushion on his side of the couch. They sit and watch some nature program about gorillas and Ben reaches out and slides a hand around April’s ankle, dips his thumb into the hollow around her tendon. They still haven’t fooled around since they stopped being dicks to each other and his hand on her leg isn’t entirely sexual, but he can’t help but feel super aware of her next to him, extra conscious of how much this is like the first time they fucked. Or maybe it’s not so much like that at all anymore. Things are by no means perfect but it all feels a little less dire. Going to work in the morning isn’t quite so hard. Walking into the Parks Department for meetings doesn’t make him want to die. And Ben thinks if Ron asked how April was doing now, telling him she’s fine wouldn’t be as much of a stretch.

\--

There’s another Harvest Festival meeting. They’re in the Parks Department conference room and Jerry and Leslie are trying to nail down the placement of all the food vendors. (Jerry got put in charge of food under the strict understanding that he was not actually to eat any of it until he was very much off-duty, lest they have another _incident_.)

Leslie’s noticeably distracted. She keeps interrupting mid-sentence to ask about something they just got done talking about, and when she tells them all to take a five-minute break, Ben stays behind in the room. Maybe he’s _growing_. Maybe he’s faking it, but even the effort feels like a step in the right direction.

Leslie’s at the head of the table totally engrossed in a spreadsheet. Ben taps his pen against his notepad.“Everything okay?”

Leslie looks up like she didn’t even know he was there and given how distracted she’s been, maybe she didn’t. She opens and closes her mouth a few times, and maybe it’s a little less painful to look at her than it was yesterday? It’s hard to keep track.

“Oh,” Leslie says. She puts the spreadsheet down and nods to herself a few times. “Yeah, everything’s fine.” Her smile’s fake. Even if he hadn’t dated her for three months, even if he wasn’t probably still totally crazy about her, he’d be able to tell so he just kind of cocks his head and waits for her to say something.

Finally Leslie breathes out, this great big sigh that shakes her shoulders, and he can see her hesitate a long time before she says, “It’s the campaign.”

Ah. He must have some sort of visible reaction because Leslie’s immediately backtracking. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have--I didn’t mean--”

But Ben holds up a hand. “It’s fine.” And it is, it totally is, except for how it makes him feel like there’s a vice around his chest, this thing that came between them, this thing that ruined everything, and really it’s the last fucking thing he wants to talk about, and yet. “What’s wrong?”

Leslie shakes her head. “Nothing in particular, just.” She bites her lip and god, he used to love when she did that. “It’s just a lot to deal with, you know?”

“Yeah, I do.” And he does. So he asks what’s going on and listens while she tells him about the long hours and the stress, how it’s everything and nothing like she thought it would be. By the time Jerry and Donna get back, some of the air has come back in the room and it’s actually not so awful. Maybe he really is growing.

Leslie starts talking about cotton candy stands and he looks out past her shoulder to where April’s sitting at her desk. Maybe his mind’s playing tricks on him, but he could almost swear she smiles at him.

\--

It's a Saturday and Ben leaves the house, actually goes out and runs errands and buys groceries. Late August is basically awful. Summer is the only time he really misses Nebraska, when the river makes the city a hot, humid mess.

April apparently doesn't share his distaste because when he gets back to the house, she's sitting in the backyard, feet propped up on a lawn chair and a bottle of tequila on the ground next to her. Ben puts away the bags of things he brought back and then slides opens the back door. "What are you doing?"

"Knitting a sweater." April doesn't look at him. She's got her head tipped all the way back and her hair twisted up. She looks peaceful, restful, but that's probably more due to the alcohol. He can't tell how much she's been drinking but her words aren't slurred or anything so it's probably not too much. Yet.

He steps outside and shuts the door, crosses to the table but keeps to the shade. They got the lawn set at Goodwill for a steal, so it's battered and beat to shit but April looks comfortable enough. He pulls out one of the chairs and sits down. "What are you drinking?"

She slides the tequila across the table, then nudges a bottle of lemon juice toward him. "Drink up."

"What the hell is this?" He has never seen anyone drink this before. And he went to college, where basically the only liquid that was off-limits was lighter fuel.

April seems unfazed. "It's a legitimate shot in Venezuela."

"It's a really sad margarita."

"Whatever." April rolls her neck and her head lolls toward him. There's a line of sweat under her ear that’s working down toward her collarbone and Ben's suddenly very aware of the fact that they haven't had sex in awhile. And he's in the middle of imaging a host of different things (the backyard's pretty shaded, their neighbors are cool enough, no one else is outside in this fucking heat anyway) when April says, "I saw Andy today."

Oh. So that explains that.

The sum total of what April has said about her relationship with Andy since they split is about the same as what she's said to him about her favorite shades of nail polish. (For the record, black and probably purple, going by the most frequently used. Not that he's kept track or anything.) And it's not like April really does _feelings_ (though at this point, he's come to realize that that's more than a little debatable) so he's sure as shit not going to ask. For want of a better option, he leans over and steals her shot glass and downs it in one and Jesus fuck, it burns like heartbreak.

"That's fucking awful." God, his eyes are watering.

April rolls her eyes. "Pussy."

It takes four more shots between them before she brings up Andy again. She was canvassing at an apartment complex across town and he answered the door. April doesn't seem worked up about it, which is almost definitely worse than if she were in hysterics.

There's a small part of him that wants to look at this as payback, wants to remind her how long she spent throwing Leslie in his face, and there's a stack of yard signs in the garage that makes a damn convincing argument. But this new thing between them (on one hand, it's just civility, but on the other it feels a lot more like camaraderie), it's tentative and fragile and fuckall if Ben's going to screw with it. So instead of needling her, he just listens to everything April has to say. Granted, the April version of spilling her soul is basically the Leslie version of ordering a sandwich, but he gets the gist.

Eventually she stops talking and just kind of sits there spinning the shot glass in her hands. Ben leans his elbows on the table and picks at a gash in the plastic.

“I’m sorry.” If it weren’t so quiet, Ben might’ve missed it, but he doesn’t. When he looks up at April, she’s picking at the label on the bottle of lemon juice. “For the yard signs and all Leslie’s campaign stuff, whatever.” She meets his eyes. “I’m not always a bitch, you know.”

He can tell how much seeing Andy must’ve shaken her because it’s the most sincere apology he’s ever gotten from her. It helps stem the little piece of him that wants to say some version of “I told you so,” and instead he says, "It helped. I mean, don't get me wrong, it was horrible. But it's not like I could avoid all that forever. It's not like it goes away."

If somebody had asked him in June to guess the one person he'd come through this break-up with, April would have been at the bottom of the list. If somebody had asked him the one person he'd be fucking for the majority of the summer, the result would have been pretty much the same. But they’re still a unit, a fucked-up crazy Ben and April unit, and when he starts talking about all the ways he’s tried to put himself back together it feels a lot less like being a pushover and a lot more like taking one for the team. He talks about Leslie and Partridge and tries to tell her some version of a story about things not going the way you think they will, how you have to rally and keep going, soldier on and all that trite Hallmark bullshit, only a little less Hallmark and a little more April Ludgate. He can't tell if he's successful but at least she doesn't walk out on him.

He ends up talking for awhile and by the end of it April's just kind of staring at him. "And, you know, I had an actual conversation with Leslie the other day. And it was good, I mean, it wasn't _great_ or anything, but it was a step."

"I get it," April interrupts. "Your heart grew three sizes that day." It has a lot less bite in it than it would've had a week ago. Even a lot less bite than it would've had three months ago. April takes a deep breath and stands up. "God, it's disgusting out here, can we go inside already?"

It's not exactly "thank you" and it certainly isn’t “I’m sorry,” but it'll do.

\--

Just when it feels like they’ve been planning the Harvest Festival forever, it’s right around the corner, time to start setting up tents and first aid stations and clearing the lot for the Fat Coaster. Entertainment 720’s handling some of the logistics and it’s nice having Tom around more, even if Jean-Ralphio’s still a giant tool. Ben stays late one night to make sure all the licenses are cleared, stops by the grocery store on his way home and picks up ice cream and the makings for enchiladas (definitely not because April takes way too much pleasure in insulting his attempts at Mexican food). But when he walks through the door, bags in hand, April’s sitting on the couch waiting for him. She’s got the marshmallow gun in front of her, so. This is either a really good sign or a really, really bad one. Ben takes a very careful step forward but she raises the gun and says, “Not so fast.”

Ben shakes his head, still super wary of where this is all headed. “April, what are you doing?”

She slides the pump back and fires, one single mini-marshmallow that hits him in the shoulder. “Nothing. What are you doing?” And there’s not exactly a smile on her face but there’s definitely the start of a grin, a light in her eyes he hasn’t seen in a really long time. It’s pretty much exactly the reaction he was hoping for last time he tried this, but back then it was about a lot of other things and trying to make her smile was all wrapped up in his own bullshit. Now he’s just genuinely relieved.

He sets the grocery bags very carefully on the floor and lunges for her. She’s quick though, up and off the couch before Ben’s even halfway across the room. The gun’s not that big and she’s careful with her shots, only fires when she knows they’ll land, and Ben takes a few in the chest, more than one to the face, one very nearly in his mouth. He picks up speed and chases her down the hallway but she surprises him by taking a right turn into his bedroom and now she’s firing with reckless abandon, mini-marshmallows landing on his sheets, rolling down behind his bookshelves, underneath his dresser. Ben would probably be pissed if she weren’t so damn gleeful about it, so wildly, enthusiastically pleased to be fucking with his stuff. Because for the first time, the joy looks genuine, and then she leans her head back and laughs and it’s like something in Ben’s chest bursts open, something wild and uncontained, because if April can be that fucking happy again then maybe there’s hope for him yet.

Ben advances on her until her back’s against his bedroom wall and then he’s got her wrists over her head, the gun still dangling from her hand. And Ben doesn’t care that he’ll be finding marshmallows in his things for weeks, doesn’t care that there’s a carton of ice cream melting on the living room floor.

She arches her back toward him and squirms a little against his hands. “Is that C-3PO on your dresser?” Her voice doesn’t exactly falter but there’s this tiny note of uncertainty, this little moment where her eyes flicker down to his mouth and she takes a breath and it’s maybe the only time he’s ever seen her almost ask for something in his life.

And because tender is exactly the wrong move here, he squeezes her wrists and leans toward her. “Fuck you,” he says, and then he's kissing her and it’s not _so_ different than it used to be, but it is. It’s definitely slower, a little gentler and a little less desperate, and it goes on for _forever_. She grinds her hips into his and when he lets go of her wrists she wraps an arm around his neck while her other hand snakes up the back of his shirt. He nips at her lip, tangles a hand in her hair, and god, he's never spent so long just _kissing_ her.

By the time he backs them up toward the bed, April's tugging his shirt over his head and reaching down to unbutton his jeans, and when he trips a little bit stepping out of them, she smiles against his mouth and it's, god. It’s kind of amazing.

They don't stare longingly into each others' eyes. She still runs her nails down his back a little harder than necessary and she has more than a few dirty things to whisper into his ear. But when he slides into her, he slips an arm around her waist and pulls her toward him and her hands on his back pull him closer and it feels like a lot. When she spins them around, plants her hands on his chest and rocks her hips and moans, she keeps her eyes on his the whole time. And it’s not that it’s romantic, it’s just that it’s--fun, or easy, or whatever. It’s exactly what it is, not anything else, and that’s pretty fucking amazing enough on its own.

They end up sprawled across the foot of the bed, April on top and by the time he slides a hand down to press his thumb to her clit, they're both already so fucking close that April tips her head back and comes. He watches her, manages to hang on until she finally opens her eyes and smiles this wicked little grin, this fucking amazing happy thing, and he reaches out and pushes her hair behind her ear. He pulls her down toward him and flips them over and it's not more than a few thrusts before he collapses down on top of her, lips pressed to the side of her neck.

April doesn’t leave right after. She wraps the sheet around herself and slings a leg off the bed, kicking it back and forth. Ben’s still got a hand on the back of her thigh and when he slides his fingers against the skin there, she huffs out a laugh and pulls away from him. “Stop it,” she says and god, she’s ticklish after she comes? Is this really the first time he’s ever noticed that? It makes him want to press her back against the pillows and find every spot that makes her smile and flinch. Instead he find a marshmallow under his pillow and tosses it at her, arcs it right onto her stomach and when she lifts a hand to flip him off, she’s laughing.

\--

The first night of Harvest Festival, it's already better than last year. No power outages, no Indian curses, no Joan Callamezzo running around trying to ruin everything. Perd Hapley even does a broadcast from the coaster that's Leslie's sure will win him a local media award.

It's not actually as awful as he thought it would be. There's a moment in the staff tent where Leslie smiles at him like they've just pulled off something incredible and Ben remembers a lot of things all at once (cotton candy and secret handshakes and feeling like the king of the whole fucking world) but it's not unmanageable.

He stays until everything's squared away (and double- and triple- and quadruple-checked) and when he goes to leave, there's a hand at his elbow pulling him back.

It's Leslie. Of course it is. She has this hesitant, awkward smile on her face and he makes sure his own smile’s genuine when he looks back at her. (It's almost not even that hard.)

"I just wanted to say thanks. For everything you did this year." She gestures toward the Ferris wheel and the game tents, toward the whole fair like he made it happen and for the first time, he looks at it too. Not as just a reminder of last year and everything that changed since then, but as something with as much promise as Leslie always seems to think it has. It's a good feeling. And he thinks maybe he _did_ fall in love with his job and the city and all the crazy things about it, and maybe that _did_ have a lot to do with Leslie, but maybe he fell in love with other things too, and those things are still there.

He's not eighteen anymore. It's not Partridge, if for no other reason than the fact that he's still here. It doesn't seem like much, but it feels like a whole hell of a lot.

He turns back to Leslie, reaches out and squeezes her wrist. "You too."

He takes his time walking back to the parking lot, makes sure to stop by the Li’l Sebastian memorial to say goodbye to Ron. When he gets to his car, April's sitting on the trunk looking out at the fair. He walks over and leans against the bumper. "You ready to go?"

April doesn't turn away. It's well past sunset and all the lights are on, the rides flashing different colors and the music from the mainstage audible even from halfway across the lot. He wonders what memories this place has for April, whether really looking at it all feels as important for her as it does for him. He wants to ask but he doesn't, just nudges her knee with his hip. "April?"

She shakes her head and the lights from the carousel catch her hair. "I think I'm going to stay. Tom convinced Jean-Ralphio that flashmobbing the bandstand would be great PR."

“Is anybody going to do it with him?”

“No.”

“Does he know that?”

“No.”

He laughs and turns his keys over in his hands. "Yeah, that might just be too sad to witness."

April pushes herself off the trunk and sways toward him when she lands. Her hand's warm around his wrist when she catches herself and she lets it lay there a second before pulling away. "Fine, go home. Tell Nigella I said hi."

He drops his eyes and smiles, unlocks the car and opens the door.

"Ben?"

April's a few cars down and Ben has to raise his voice over the music. "Yeah?"

"She's going to win." April shifts back and forth on her feet. "Leslie. She's going to win."

It takes him a second to smile but he does, nods his head and says, "Good."

April doesn't say anything else but she smiles at him like she means it and then turns and heads back to the fair. He watches her weave between the aisles on the way back to the entrance and she's well out of sight by the time he starts the car.

He drives home with the windows down and for the first time it feels like the summer's coming to an end. The air almost feels like fall.

When he pulls into the garage, he sits in the car for a long second, leans back against the headrest and waits. He thinks about the Harvest Festival and Partridge, about sad margaritas and marshmallow guns, about towns (home, blonde, and otherwise) and starting over.

When he finds the yard signs behind the cabinet, they don't look any worse for being stuck in the garage for a few weeks. He swipes at a line of dust with his sleeve and then picks a spot in the yard that’s visible from the corner. _Vote Knope!_ The ground's soft enough that it doesn't take more than a few good pushes to get the sign to stick.

He stands there awhile looking around the yard and even though it’s probably just his imagination, he thinks he can see the top of the Ferris wheel over the trees across the way.

 _Ice Clown Gets Down, Turns Things Around._ It might be a few weeks before he puts it in the Journal, but still. Baby steps.


End file.
